Augustus John (64 page)

‘It was Montaigne who said that height was the only beauty of man, and indeed height is the only thing that gives presence to a man. A
miniature of Venus may be more attractive than her taller sisters, but a man must have height to be imposing in appearance, or indeed impressive.’

Harris then goes on to portray Augustus as a perfect example of the male species.

‘Over six feet in height,
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spare and square shouldered, a good walker who always keeps himself fit and carries himself with an air, John would draw the eye in any ground. He is splendidly handsome with excellent features, great violet eyes and long lashes… he is physically, perhaps, the handsomest specimen of the genus homo that I have ever met.’

Yet this was the man who, three nights in succession, had been rejected by Nellie; who had failed precisely where Harris was successful. His pitfall, Harris insists, ‘is not drink’. Jesus drank. No: if he fails ‘it will be because he has been too heavily handicapped by his extraordinary physical advantages. His fine presence and handsome face brought him notoriety very speedily, and that’s not good for a man. Women and girls have made up to him and he has spent himself in living instead of doing his work.’

By the third night at Harris’s villa Augustus had had enough and, shouldering his belongings, stole out at dawn and made his way down the hill to Nice harbour, where he laid up in a sailors’ café. ‘Ah! the exquisite relief! To be alone again and out of that infected atmosphere, that madhouse!’
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It was an instance of that ‘certain abruptness of manner’ without which, Harris gleefully noted, ‘he would be almost too good-looking’.

In his amusing descriptions of Harris thirty years later, Augustus attempts to get something of his own back by taking it out of him
visually.
Harris, he observes, ‘was looking his ugliest’ by the third day; while Nellie (then in her thirties and not unattractive) is converted into a middle-aged matron. But when, in 1929, Augustus first read Harris’s Contemporary Portrait of him, he was not amused. In a letter to Harris’s biographer Elmer Gertz (25 May 1929), he explains that he had left Harris’s villa ‘because I found the moral atmosphere of the place unbearable… I could not consent to stay as the guest of a cad and bully posing as a man of genius.’ Besides, his host’s habit of dragging the name of Jesus Christ into any conversation was obnoxious ‘coming from a man of Harris’s moral standards’.
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Here, unmistakably, is the pomposity of Edwin John, his father. His fear of blackmail marks the first hereditary pull towards that inflated caution with which, in later years, he sought to protect himself. ‘It seems hopeless for me ever to attempt to conceal even the secrets of the water-closet from the outside world,’ he complained to Wyndham Lewis (July 1910). ‘There will still be an industrious person with a rake stationed at the other end of the sewer. It is true that I don’t
put myself out for secrecy… ’ But the superficial film of secrecy had already begun to grow.

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The effects of his visit to Nice lingered with Augustus like a bad hangover. ‘I expect he would be less gloomy with just his Family,’ Helen Maitland confided to Lamb. Soon afterwards she left Martigues to join Lamb, having assured herself that Dorelia ‘seems better. She doesn’t get a pain in her side anymore.’

A few weeks later, in the early morning of Monday 1 May, Dorelia gave birth prematurely to a dead child at the Villa Ste-Anne. Throughout that day her life hung agonizingly in the balance. ‘She
nearly
died afterwards of loss of blood and was really saved by having sea-water injected into her body,’ Augustus wrote to Quinn (5 May 1910). ‘…The child, which was a girl, would have been welcome 3 months hence. It had got displaced somehow.’ Pale and weak, Dorelia kept to her bed for a month. ‘Happily she has more common sense than would be needed to fit out a dozen normal people and doesn’t worry herself at all, now that she is comfortable.’

Augustus was less calm. The hideous threat of puerperal fever which had killed Ida terrified him – ‘I know that demon already too well.’ He was seized with a panic of guilt and helplessness. Now that his family was so scattered – three children in France, three in London, and one, Henry, in Hampshire – he needed more than ever a strong centre to his life. If Dorelia died, everything fell apart. Being ‘totally without help except for the neighbours’, he wired Helen Maitland, who returned bringing with her Henry Lamb. ‘We made an amnesty for these peculiar conditions,’ Lamb explained to Ottoline. With Dorelia and Helen in the house, Lamb assumed a very John-like role, and it was difficult for Augustus to object, though he feared, in Lamb’s wake, tremors of gossip.
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Only when it was clear that Dorelia was ‘on the high road to recovery’ did Lamb leave, after which Helen kept him informed by letter. ‘Her lips are dreadfully pale but I think she’s getting better really’ (19 May 1910). In another letter she observed: ‘Dorelia, you know, doesn’t care for herself and if she thinks she does for other people I am sure it’s a mistake and it’s something else that she minds.’

Though she had brought a packet of tea with which to combat the crisis, Helen was handicapped by being unused to children and cooking.
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Her meals may well have helped to subdue the boys, and they began to tell even on Augustus’s constitution. ‘He is very saintly the way he eats the strange food put before him and even finds ways of pretending to like it,’ she wrote to Lamb.

By 25 May, Augustus reported that Dorelia ‘is getting strong. She is gay to ravishing point.’
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They had emerged at last from their ‘awful adventure’ but, anxious to avoid any possibility of a relapse, Augustus planned to import ‘a sturdy wench’ into the house to do the work as soon as Helen left. ‘We have an abominably pretty housemaid,’ he was able to complain a little later that summer.
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Dorelia’s illness overshadowed the rest of that summer at Martigues. For a time Augustus took a studio in Marseilles – ‘an astonishing town’, he assured Quinn (28 May 1910), ‘probably the dirtiest in Europe’. But he grew ill with a series of stomach disorders cheerfully diagnosed by Dorelia as appendicitis, cancer and ulcers. Personally he blamed the climate, which was too hot, too dry and too windy. By July the other four children arrived – something Augustus strongly welcomed in theory – and their complaints were added in chorus to his own. ‘I have my whole family over here now, and it’s a good deal,’ he conceded.
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Regular cheques from Quinn and Hugh Lane arrived; but he was more resistant to this medicine now. He found himself a martyr, suddenly, to homesickness. ‘There are no green fields here,’ he noticed (5 August 1910), ‘scratch the ground and you come to the rock… a green meadow smells sweet to me… This place doesn’t succeed in making me feel well – but I have intervals of well being.’
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A curious longing for the west of Ireland swept over him, and for the people of Ireland with their wry ramshackle ways, so much more appealing than the complacent natives of Provence. ‘These people are too bavard [talkative],’ he told Ottoline (5 August 1910), ‘too concrete – too academic even. They all look as if they’ve solved the riddle of the universe and lost their souls in the process.’

In this mood he decided to return to London before the end of September and, though he at once regretted this decision, it gave a zest to his last month there. He was working once more against time, and this suited him. Although little finished work had been possible – or so he believed – he had lightened his palette and made many brilliant little studies that would, he calculated, be useful for his Hugh Lane decorations. He felt that he had begun something new ‘with all the lust and keenness of a convalescent’.
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‘What I have been about here is rapid sketching in paint,’ he told Quinn (25 August 1910), ‘and I can say (with some excitement) that it’s only during the last week or two that I have made an absolute technical step… I want to live long!’

That November the fruits of Augustus’s nine months abroad were shown at the Chenil Gallery in a one-man show entitled ‘Provençal Studies and Other Works’. At the same time, a mile away, another exhibition had just opened: Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.

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‘The portrait was painted in 1907 at Coole by Augustus John,’ Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespeare on 13 November 1933, the year after Lady Gregory died. ‘I am using it as a frontispiece for my collected volume of lyrics which you will get in a day or two.’ When the etching was rejected, Yeats had written privately to his publisher A. H. Bullen (March 1908): ‘The Augustus John is a wonderful etching but fanciful as a portrait. But remember that all fine artistic work is received with an outcry, with hatred even. Suspect all work that is not.’

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‘I have recently taken it upon myself (with what share of justification I know not) to confer the title Rai upon a friend of mine – one Percy Wyndham Lewis – whose qualifications – rather historical or anthropological than linguistic viz. – the having coupled and lived in a state of copulation with a wandering Spanish romi in Brittany – seemed to me upon reflection to merit the honourable and distinctive title of our confraternity,’ Augustus informed Scott Macfie (6 November 1908). ‘…I may add that my friend appears fully to appreciate the value of his new dignity. He remarks: “Henceforth, my brother, my seed is implicated with that of Egypt”.’

*3
The words ‘one of them’ have been crossed out, and ‘they’ more accurately substituted.

*4
Yet the words, so failing in gratitude, were more forthcoming in parody. John wrote a number of verses in the Symons style. See Appendix Four.

*5
They turned up in the summer of 1911 at Liverpool and were infiltrated by several members of the Gypsy Lore Society in costume.

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Augustus was actually just under six feet, but walked tall.

‘It is impossible to think that any other single exhibition can ever have had so much effect as did that on the rising generation.’

Vanessa Bell

There can have been few more unfortunate times for a British painter to have been born than in the 1870s. At home, he would have passed his youth in an atmosphere of genteel tranquillity and then, at the onset of middle age, been overtaken by changes unprecedented for their speed and significance. It was difficult for such a painter not to be at some period out of step with his age. For even in 1910 it was still possible to believe one was living in Victorian times. Nothing very much had changed. Victorianism had hardened into a tiny Ice Age, impervious to the intellectual fires that were lighting up the Continent.

Fear was the artificial stimulant that had kept nineteenth-century values alive beyond their natural life span: fear of national decline and the rise of the degenerate lower classes; fear of sex and the desire for birth control; fear that the very implements of fear, poverty and religious superstition, were losing their power; fear of foreigners.

Then, ‘in or about December 1910 human character changed.’ The date was not arbitrary. Announcing
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this change fourteen years later, Virginia Woolf chose it so as to make Roger Fry’s exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (which actually opened on 8 November 1910) a symbol of the way in which European ideas invaded English conservatism. For the first time people in Britain saw the pictures of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, and in or about December 1910 the character of British art changed. The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition which, two years later, admitted British artists, signalled the last opportunity for them to choose the path they would follow and the view posterity would take of them.

The ‘awful excitement’ which erupted after ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was a journalistic freak diagnosed by Roger Fry as an
outbreak of British philistinism, more extreme than anything since Whistler’s day.
The Times
critic declared a state of anarchy;
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Robert Ross warned readers of the
Morning Post
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that the exhibiting artists were lunatics, and Charles Ricketts wrote to congratulate him on his percipience. Doctors were called in to pronounce on the pictures; Philip Burne-Jones saw in the show ‘a huge practical joke organised in Paris at the expense of our countrymen’, though Wilfrid Blunt could detect ‘no trace of humour in it’, only ‘a handful of mud’: and he summed up the exhibits as ‘works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show’. It was left to a Royal Academician, the ‘desecrator’ of St Paul’s, Sir William Richmond, to strike a note of pathos: ‘I hope that in the last years of a long life’, he wrote, ‘it will be the last time I shall feel ashamed of being a painter.’
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‘Why do people get so excited about art?’ asked Lytton Strachey. ‘…I must say I should be pleased with myself, if I were Matisse or Picasso – to be able, a humble Frenchman, to perform by means of a canvas and a little paint, the extraordinary feat of making some dozen country gentlemen in England, every day for two months, grow purple in the face!’
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The answer was that, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘art is a carrier of ideology.’
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Roger Fry succeeded as no one else had done in smoking out British philistinism from its lair. It was especially irritating to find this modern movement heralded by an acknowledged authority on the Old Masters. Fry used his exhibition of foreign artists, with their rearrangements of visual facts, their unconventional structures, their slapdash lack of finish, their provoking incorrectnesses and appalling liberties, to disturb ordinary comfortable ways of seeing things. Their strange relations of form suggested all sorts of exciting new possibilities. ‘Perhaps no one but a painter can understand it and perhaps no one but a painter of a certain age,’ wrote Vanessa Bell. ‘But it was as if one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel.’
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